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The "Voyages Extraordinaires" of M.

Jules Verne deserve to be made widely known in English-speaking

countries by means of carefully prepared translations. Witty and

ingenious adaptations of the researches and discoveries of modern

science to the popular taste, which demands that these should be

presented to ordinary readers in the lighter form of cleverly mingled

truth and fiction, these books will assuredly be read with profit and

delight, especially by English youth. Certainly no writer before M.

Jules Verne has been so happy in weaving together in judicious

combination severe scientific truth with a charming exercise of playful

imagination. . Iceland, the starting point of the marvellous

underground journey imagined in this volume, is invested at the present

time with. a painful interest in consequence of the disastrous

eruptions last Easter Day, which covered with lava and ashes the poor

and scanty vegetation upon which four thousand persons were partly

dependent for the means of subsistence. For a long time to come the

natives of that interesting island, who cleave to their desert home

with all that amor patriae which is so much more easily

understood than explained, will look, and look not in vain, for the

help of those on whom fall the smiles of a kindlier sun in regions not

torn by earthquakes nor blasted and ravaged by volcanic fires. Will the

readers of this little book, who, are gifted with the means of

indulging in the luxury of extended beneficence, remember the distress

of their brethren in the far north, whom distance has not barred from

the claim of being counted our "neighbours"? And whatever their humane

feelings may prompt them to bestow will be gladly added to the

Mansion-House Iceland Relief Fund. . In his desire to ascertain

how far the picture of Iceland, drawn in the work of Jules Verne is a

correct one, the translator hopes in the course of a mail or two to

receive a communication from a leading man of science in the island,

which may furnish matter for additional information in a future

edition. . The scientific portion of the French original is not

without a few errors, which the translator, with the kind assistance of

Mr. Cameron of H. M. Geological Survey, has ventured to point out and

correct. It is scarcely to be expected in a work in which the element

of amusement is intended to enter more largely than that of scientific

instruction, that any great degree of accuracy should be arrived at.

Yet the translator hopes that what trifling deviations from the text or

corrections in foot notes he is responsible for, will have done a

little towards the increased usefulness of the work. .    Buy Book at Lowest Price on Amazon

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